I have for some years assumed that Scott Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame (Ambivalence of the Sacred), is right that (1) the way religion plays out in our world is ambivalent. As a powerful force of social cohesion—like social identities of many kinds such as nationality, ethnicity, etc.—it can be wielded for good or for harm or for lots of states in between. Vocal opponents of this position stress that, even if it might be ambivalent, religion’s overall impact is (2) mainly harmful or (3) mainly helpful. After clarifying key terms and exploring our own initial views about religion and violence, we will examine these three “benchmark” positions about it.

We will test these and other perspectives against some actual historical and current events generally alleged to be cases of religious violence and discuss whether these are real cases of religious violence, and, if so, as importantly, in what way or ways. We will be pointedly on the hunt for other factors (such as political, economic, psychological, etc.) that might be driving the violence, and will ask how religion might function to hide such factors, or aggravate them, or cause the conflict in its own right, etc. Recognizing that claims about causation are complicated even for strictly physical phenomena, I will invite graduate students and those undergraduates who opt in to explore work in philosophy of causation to inform these discussions.